


hold tightly to the walls

by jasondont (minigami)



Series: a million little battles [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, Minor CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Not Actually Unrequited Love, One-Sided Attraction, Post-Episode: s04e07 Darkness on Umbara
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:14:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25335208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minigami/pseuds/jasondont
Summary: Obi-Wan knows some of the members of the Council do not really believe that what the troopers are telling is true, even if they have proof of the fact. Pong Krell may have been harsh and unbending, prone to anger and arrogance, but nobody is perfect, and he’s served the Order faithfully for decades, and they would have known.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody & Obi-Wan Kenobi, CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Ahsoka Tano
Series: a million little battles [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1821466
Comments: 4
Kudos: 192





	hold tightly to the walls

**Author's Note:**

> i have a whole page of ideas for this series and most of them are as fucking depressing as this one. one of these days i'll write them happy, or at least happier, but they do the whole wartime pining thing so, so well.

  
What can be seen of the evening sky over the starfighters and the roof of the shuttles is very red. Coruscant is a cesspool of pollution, poverty and corruption, but its sunsets are a wonder. Obi-Wan, half-hidden behind a stack of crates, divides his attention between his commander and the setting sun. He’s been loitering there for almost ten minutes, caught between the need to comfort a man he considers his friend and the certainty his presence won’t be welcome. Cody’s anger is something cold and heavy he can taste in the back of his throat. It tastes of iron, and for the past few months it has become almost familiar.

Obi-Wan isn’t sure if Cody has always been this angry, this brimming with frustration and righteous fury, or it’s only now, after almost three years of war, that he’s begun to be aware of the fact.

He doesn’t need to ask himself what the Marshall Commander is doing there: he already knows. 

As if invoked by Obi-Wan’s thoughts, an Order shuttle appears in the bright red sky, a grey speck that grows slowly but inexorably in size.   
They could have brought Krell’s body back to Coruscant in Anakin’s Venator, but he refused, and Obi-Wan didn’t really have the heart or even the inclination to argue that point in particular. The body has waited back on Umbara for the past few days, until a Jedi Order shuttle could be dispatched.   
And now they are bringing Krell back home, to his pyre and his place of honour in the Temple’s catacombs, as if he were another Jedi fallen in battle.

Obi-Wan knows that some of the members of the Council do not really believe that what the troopers are telling is true, even if they have proof of the fact. Pong Krell may have been harsh and unbending, prone to anger and arrogance, but nobody is perfect, and he served the Order faithfully for decades, and they would have known. They would have known if he had fallen to the Dark Side, if the things the 501st's captain says he did were true.   
The trooper who shot him is already on his way to a penal battalion, out in the Rim. The Kaminoans wanted him 'decommissioned'; Tarkin and his people, on the other hand, were for once proposing a more lenient approach.

Obi-Wan was not allowed to take part in the vote.

The Jedi sighs. He brushes a hand through his hair and gives in to the tentantion to lean against one of the crates. He keeps his eyes on Cody, unfamiliar in his grey uniform, his spine straight, his hat on and his hands linked at his back. During the meeting he looked as he always does: quietly professional, polite. Distant. He’s always respected the Council because that is his job, even if Obi-Wan knows he doesn’t think much of some of its members.  
He’d feel more offended if he didn’t know he absolutely despises Tarkin and most of the other 'nat-born' officials, as he and his brothers call them.

Obi-Wan blinks; he feels a familiar presence coming. He makes sure his shields are in order and then straightens his back. When he hears Ahsoka’s steps, he’s already smiling.

“Master?”   
“Ahsoka,” he answers, turning towards her. He feels a spike of something coming from Cody, but doesn’t look back to him: shock, shame, something ugly and complicated that may be disappointment. Noise travels in the hangar; he must have heard them. “I thought you’d be with your master.”  
The teenager sighs and rolls her eyes, subdued but still expressive.  
“He had ‘business’ to attend to in the city,” she answers. She hugs herself, and a sliver of something frail and young escapes from her own shielded mind. “I think he went to visit the Chancellor.”  
Obi-Wan sighs before he can control himself, and earns himself a smile, small and short-lived as it is.   
“I don’t know what he sees in him,” she says, her voice quiet. “He’s so… old.”  
Not for the first time, Obi-Wan finds himself excusing his former Padawan’s questionable taste in friends.   
“Anakin’s known him since he was a child,” he says. “He sees him as a… mentor, of sorts.”

Ahsoka hums. Her montrals twitch, and she looks to Cody, small and lonely against the red sky. Her shoulders drop. She bites her lower lip, a flash of sharp teeth, there and gone. She doesn’t ask what he’s waiting for--she doesn’t need to. She is a clever child, and she has already put the pieces together.   
“He shouldn’t be brought back here. He was a monster and a murderer,” she suddenly mutters. “And we- we should have been there. This shouldn’t have happened.”  
They are all grieving, not just the troopers. Obi-Wan had fought beside some of the men that died on Umbara for almost two years and a half; he can tell little stories about most of them. Waxer and that time he almost adopted a Twi’lek youngling during the Ryloth campaign; Rec and his company wide sabacc tournaments; Cee and his tall tales.  
For Ahsoka, however, it’s slightly different; she is so young, and they care so much about her. Clone troopers are gregarious ever for human beings, Obi-Wan doesn’t know if by nature or if as a survival mechanism. She’s grown with them, changed and matured with them. Obi-Wan knows she feels more comfortable by their side, in the belly of a Venator or in a dirtside base after battle than in the Temple.   
He’s extremely proud of her, but Obi-Wan knows that some masters believe she’s too reckless, too prone to flashes of temper, too much like Anakin; for the 501st, however, she’s just _enough_.

The shuttle lands. With a jolt, Obi-Wan recognises Quinlan as one of the figures that exit the ramp. Krell’s huge sarcophagus follows, and then a squad of commandos, the bright blue of their visors uncanny against the red of the setting sun despite the distance.   
The commandos salute when they pass by Cody; Obi-Wan’s heard _things_ about them, but the only thing he can feel in the Force is a reticent kind of respect, hard won, dense and brittle like old iron. Quinlan, as always, is a black mirror; he answers Obi-Wan’s nudge with one of his own, and doesn’t look at him. He just nods in Cody’s direction, his face blank, solemn. 

At Obi-Wan’s side, Ahsoka rattles a snarl, the sound so low he can feel it in his stomach.  
“Padawan,” he says, the admonition gentle.   
“He doesn’t deserve to be back here,” she says, her voice thick. Obi-Wan turns to her. She’s gotten so big, and she still has much to grow--he thinks she’ll end up taller than him.  
“Maybe so,” Obi-Wan answers. “But he’s here and he’s dead and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”  
He knows he sounds cold--he also knows he’s right.   
“It’s not fair,” Ahsoka says. She sounds so young; her voice makes him hurt somewhere, deep in his chest. She sniffs, turns away. “I know I shouldn’t be so- so angry, Master, but...“  
“It _is_ unfair,” he agrees. He sighs, and rubs his face. He’s so very tired. From the corner of his eye, he sees Cody turn his back to the now empty shuttle, start to make his way to them.

“Would you like to have dinner with me today?” he asks Ahsoka. The girl blinks, and for an instant Obi-Wan wonders if he’s overstepped. He’s always tried to leave her and Anakin their space. But then she smiles, and nods, and he feels something unclench in his chest. That might have been the first thing he’s done right that day.   
Ahsoka sees Cody right before Obi-Wan hears his steps, his dress shoes treading almost soundlessly against the hangar’s duracrete floors.

Obi-Wan does not sigh. He keeps his smiling face on and turns so he won’t give Cody his back.   
He isn’t looking him, however, his gaze already on Ahsoka. She smiles, small and a bit crooked, and while he doesn’t smile back, his face softens slightly.   
“Commander,” he says. Ahsoka’s smile grows bigger, becomes more genuine.  
“Commander,” she parrots. They’ve been greeting each other like that for years now, both of them perfectly aware of how ridiculous it is that they are supposed to be the same rank. A fourteen year old Jedi Padawan giving orders to ten year old soldiers who looked just a few years older than her. When she turns to Obi-Wan, Ahsoka’s still smiling; she feels more settled in the Force. “I’ll wait for you in your rooms, master.”

Obi-Wan nods. He hides his hands inside the sleeves of his robe while he and Cody watch her march back to the temple. When Obi-Wan turns to look at him, his commander’s eyes are on him already, bright and dark beneath his hat. The Jedi cannot read his face with the sun at his back, and he is almost as inscrutable in the Force.  
“General.”  
Obi-Wan swallows. He feels… ashamed. Guilty. As if he had been caught doing something that’s not allowed. He nods, his throat dry.  
“Cody,” he finally answers. He opens his mouth, and closes it again a second later. There’s something that he should be saying--if only he knew what that is. But the words have fled his mouth, his head, and left him awkward and self-conscious. So they just look at each other in silence, alone in the Temple hangar, between Delta-7 starfighters and larties.

It occurs to Obi-Wan that he doesn’t need to ask what Cody is thinking and feeling; he can guess. They usually see things the same way; if Obi-Wan blames himself, Cody must be as well. Oh, he will deny it if he asks, but again: Obi-Wan doesn’t need to. He’s probably also blaming himself, as if he could have done anything against Krell if he had been the aware of what the Jedi Master was doing.   
Obi-Wan should have had him cremated back on Umbara, his ashes left on the surface of the planet, among the bodies of all the men he killed. Force knows all of them are more deserving of a… damn _state funeral_ than Krell ever was.

Obi-Wan blinks, surprised by his own anger, and then makes himself let go of the feeling. It’s not productive--what is done is done.   
“General? Do we have our new orders?”   
If they had, he’d know already--he’s Marshall Commander. He’s always on call.  
Obi-Wan moves his head. “Not yet, Commander.”  
They fall into silence, shoulder to shoulder in the empty hangar. It’s not easy, but it’s familiar, and Obi-Wan feels something inside himself _settle_.  
Obi-Wan can feel his commander’s eyes on his face, but he doesn’t turn to look at him, although he’d very much like to. Precisely because he’d like to. It’s really blasted inconvenient, how much he likes looking at his commander’s face. 

“I need to go back to the barracks,” Cody says, his voice quiet in the silence. Obi-Wan nods, and glances at him from the corner of his eye. Cody isn’t looking at him, his eyes low. He looks… lost. Tired and too old and too young at the same time.   
Obi-Wan looks away again. It feels like intruding, to be able to read all that in Cody’s face. 

There must be something he could say to make everything better.

“Good night, then, Commander,” he ends up saying. They’ve been given three days of leave planetside for the first time in almost six months. “I’ll see you in a few days.”  
“Yes, sir,” Cody answers. He takes a couple of steps, and then turns back to face him. Obi-Wan forces himself to look him in the eye--it’s the least he owes him. He has to raise his chin to do that. With the dying light of Coruscant’t only sun at his back, Cody feels like a giant. “Goodnight, general.”

  
Cody mounts one of the Temple swoop bikes and takes off; soon, he’s just another light in the city’s traffic.   
Obi-Wan watches him until he can’t.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm jasondont at tumblr dot com, come talk to me!


End file.
